fresh water circulated in a slow, majestic,
rain-driven cycle that nurtured an ecosystem
unique on earth. Starting at a chain of lakes
south of Orlando, water flowed south into the
Kissimmee River. Carrying the system's life
blood, the Kissimmee meandered through
palmetto-studded savannas to Lake Okeecho
bee, which has an average depth of only 12 feet
but covers 730 square miles.
Periodically spilling over the lake's low
southern rim, the water spread in a 50-mile
wide sheet, moving south across the saw grass
of the Everglades at about a hundred feet a
day. Named the "river of grass" by Florida
writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas, this great
sheet of water contributed to the rain machine
that constantly renewed the cycle.
Rainfall is generous-40 to 65 inches a year.
But most falls in the soggy summer season.
Because the flat relief limits the construction
of conventional reservoirs, rain that the land
cannot quickly absorb is channeled into the
sea. Much water is also lost to evaporation
and transpiration by plants. During the dry
winter months, when tourist demands peak,
wells deplete the aquifers, especially on the
teeming coasts.
T HE DISRUPTION of south Florida's
natural system began after the
Civil War, with the appearance of
northern investors with grandiose
dreams. In an environmental onslaught, Phil
adelphia toolmaker Hamilton Disston under
took to drain the Everglades and connect
Okeechobee via a boat canal to the Gulf coast,
lowering the level of the flood-prone lake. Pro
moter Henry Flagler built railroads and
brought hotels to the east coast.
With the new century came Governor
Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, who promised
to drain the Everglades once and for all. A vast
network of locks, dams, and hundreds of miles
of canals further lowered Lake Okeechobee
and snaked deep into the Everglades. The
"It'smy grandson I worry about," says Linda
Valladares, whose well was contaminated
by carcinogens, perhaps from a leaking land
fill. Broward County supplied bottled water for
six months and now pipes in water. Porous
land and a high water table raise the risk of
leaching. Liners, now required, anchor a new
Dade County landfill (top) at the base of an
older landfill that is unlined but monitored.
newly drained muck soil provided extraor
dinary crop yields, and farming boomed.
But farmers soon discovered that their
prized soil burned like tinder during the dry
months, the fires spreading for miles. Worse,
the land itself was disappearing. As fields were
drained, the top layer of muck dried to a fine
powder and blew away, or it decomposed
through an oxidizing process, releasing nutri
ents that washed into surrounding canals.
Devastating hurricanes in 1926 and 1928
burst low earthen levees around the lake,
killing more than 2,000 people. The state
appealed to Congress, and at its direction the
U. S. Army Corps of Engineers started the
massive Herbert Hoover Dike that now encir
cles Lake Okeechobee, constricting the heart
of the system. After another hurricane in 1947
the corps launched other ambitious plumbing
projects-surgery that changed the watery